


A Promise to Your Fallen

by ThisDominionIsMine



Series: Mover of the Mountains [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Communal parenting, F/M, Found Family, War Rig Family, roadtrips and politics and plot-driving nightmares hooray!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 17:16:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6865729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisDominionIsMine/pseuds/ThisDominionIsMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Are your people okay? The ones you went back to save? Safe? Fed? Strong?”<br/>“Yes.” She can definitely hear the Doof Warrior now.<br/>“You left me behind, on the other side of the mountains,” Valkyrie says. “I’m not going to walk out of the desert just because you regret not turning around. Let my bones rest. Stop kicking them awake with your worrying.”<br/>***<br/>Sometimes, you just have to go find your ghosts' skeletons in order to put them to rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Promise to Your Fallen

**Author's Note:**

> If you're really determined, you can probably get through this fic without reading the preqeul (A Promise to Your Villains), but I can't exactly recommend it. If you read APTYV and hated everything about it, I would also recommend not reading this. To everyone else: welcome back/aboard!

Furiosa hasn’t had a dream in a long time; sleep is either a dull, safe blur of dark, or the white-hot rawness of nightmares.

The dream starts in the setting of an old nightmare, an old memory. She’s watching herself, twelve years old, crouched in the damp dirt between rows of small green things, observing as Valkyrie – thirteen – trickles water over the plants. Dreaming Furiosa is sitting in a half-dead tree. She stares at the horizon and waits for the dust cloud that she knows will come boiling out of the west, from beyond the mountains.

“You put up a hell of a fight.” Valkyrie’s voice comes from above, where the branches are dead and dry and dangerous. Her silhouette blots out the sun.

Furiosa doesn’t turn her head. “When?”

“Always.” Valkyrie shifts her weight; the branches rattle a threat. “I knew you’d make it back.”

Furiosa doesn’t ask which return she’s talking about. She can see the first hint of the dust cloud. She’s not sure if she can hear the faint battle-thunder of the Doof Wagon, or if she’s imagining because she knows it’s coming.

“I miss you,” Valkyrie says.

Furiosa blinks. “I miss you, too.”

“Are your people okay? The ones you went back to save? Safe? Fed? Strong?”

“Yes.” She can definitely hear the Doof Warrior now.

“You left me behind, on the other side of the mountains,” Valkyrie says. “I’m not going to walk out of the desert just because you regret not turning around. Let my bones rest. Stop kicking them awake with your worrying.”

Their younger selves have registered the danger. Valkyrie dashes past the tree; Furiosa stops at the base, picks up her rifle, and swings the muzzle towards the horde. Mary Jo Bassa is sprinting in from the corner of her vision. The branches overhead shudder and creak, the sun erupts forth, and it’s not Valkyrie who leaps to the ground but her mother, Sigrun, in a knee-length leather jacket that Furiosa will not see again for seven thousand days, and will be trimmed with crow feathers when she does. A jacket that is now wrapped around a crushed and broken corpse, east of the mountains.

Furiosa sights down the barrel into the eyes of Immortan Joe. Her shot slams into his windshield and stops there. The rumble of the engine shakes through her whole body, and Furiosa wakes up.

She’s in the garage, on top of the war rig, where she stretched out to sleep for a few minutes while Max memorized the new ignition sequence. He was supposed to wake her up once he finished. When she sits up, she sees him standing at the rear of a crowd by the window. There’s a convoy coming in – that’s normal, there was a run to Gas Town expected back in the late afternoon, but Max was working on the ignition sequence just before noon. She’s been asleep for hours.

Furiosa climbs off the war rig. Max’s head turns as she stalks up behind him. “You don’t sleep enough,” he murmurs when she stops beside him.

“I sleep plenty.”

He raises one eyebrow.

She sighs. “Remember the sequence?”

“One, three, one, two, one, green, black, green, go.” He recites it fast, tapping out a beat on his thigh.

Furiosa rubs at the sleep-grit caked around her eyes. The last car on the convoy slips from the sunset-painted sand into the shadow of the Citadel. “Can I talk to you?”

***

Sapling has grown a lot since the Citadel rode to war against the invaders from the north. Furiosa keeps meaning to tell her the story. She’s definitely heard the one about freeing the Citadel from Joe’s forces from her mothers. As for the one with the north, she’s had pieces from Vik the Buzzard, who she follows around constantly, but Vik tells it as the Buzzards saw it: a particularly interesting raiding, ravaging, and scrap-collecting opportunity; all her mothers and aunts can cover is the politics. Not the cannibals. Not the drive through the foothills, not meeting Nada and Amí, not the battle before the Buzzards bothered to roll in. Not finishing off the fights in Gas Town or the Bullet Farm.

Sapling is older now that Furiosa was when she was taken from the Green Place. She bleeds. Furiosa finds Toast eating dinner with her and Vik at one end of a table crammed with talkative boys who were once War Pups. Sapling has her back to them; Vik is waving her arms around to tell a story. Furiosa recognizes the “car flipping over” motion.

She comes to a stop at the end of the table. “I need a favor.”

“You need to sit down and eat something,” Toast says. She’s got gray coming in at her temples. Furiosa does too, and so does Max, but seeing it on Toast makes her heart clench. Vik tries to tell her it’s good luck. Vik is immortal, for all any of them know. Her leg never healed enough to support her weight, but she’ll probably roll her chair around the Citadel for the rest of eternity, pretending to be wise even as she slurs most of the words that she remembers to translate out of Buzzard.

Furiosa sets her plate down next to Toast’s and takes a bite of greens. “I want to take a trip. East of the mountains.”

“What for?”

Furiosa hesitates. “To look for something.”

Toast waits.

Furiosa pokes at the roasted lizard on her plate. “Valkyrie’s jacket. And her bones.”

Toast blinks, and then the memory sparks behind her eyes. “Crow feathers. In the tower.”

Furiosa nods.

Sapling butts in: “Who?”

“Valkyrie: she died before you were born – you remember the story,” Toast answers, but her eyes don’t leave Furiosa. “What brought this on?”

Furiosa shrugs and rubs at her nose. “Would you believe me if I said I had a dream?”

***

The Citadel has made a slow transition away from the labels of the god-king era. Those who were grown at the time of the fall still say Milking Mother, Wretched, War Boy, but Sapling and her generation – the Free – can’t feel those words in their bones the same way. Even the War Pups who let down the platform don’t all call themselves that. Instead they’ll say mechanic, farmer, guard, doctor, electrician, stoneworker, scavenger…

They had to change the format of the council for them, and to set an example for the stuttering democracies of Gas Town and Bullet Farm. The old groups will still have a say as long as there are members left to speak, but the new generation holds their own caucus to choose two seats at the table. By the time Cheedo is as gray and wrinkled as Vik, they’ll have the whole thing. But today there are still mostly Milking Mothers, Wretched, and War Boys staring down the length of polished sandstone at Furiosa.

“We could make it a trading mission,” Capable says. “You’d go through the Rock Riders’ pass, right? If Nada no longer holds power, you just barter yourself safe passage.”

“What’s so important about these bones, exactly?” The question comes from a white Free representative who looks younger than Sapling and has a red tuft of beard hanging off his chin.

Polly, who is going to sit on the council until her heart stops in her chest, turns her head. “They’re from a woman who died so you could live without thirst or fear.” Her laser gaze swings back to Furiosa. “You should take the war rig.”

The table erupts: what a risk, what a waste of resources, and to go hunting for a corpse that’s probably buried under a sand dune –

Polly is louder than all of them: “It may be a folly of a trip, but it’ll be worse than that if she gets abducted or murdered because we let her go alone.”

“I don’t need a war rig,” Furiosa says. “It’ll just be me and Max.”

“No it won’t,” Toast cuts in. “If we’re going bone-hunting, I want to find Angharad and Miss Giddy. They won’t be spread far apart.”

“Unless a dust storm has come along in all the years since and moved them – no, I’m sure you’ll find their corpses.” The redhead throws his hands up. Furiosa is pretty sure his name is Dunc. “They’re dead! Why do you care?”

“I’m coming too,” Capable says. Her hands are folded in her lap. She runs her body like an engine. Two years after the war, she got pregnant by someone whose name she won’t say. Before it was ever really alive, she woke up with blood spilling between her legs, and there wasn’t a thing Dag can do. She spent three days sleeping, then threw herself back into her life. She admits that she was going to call it Nux, whether it was a boy or girl or anything in between. She’s never said much more about it. She knows how to keep moving. But there are still nights that she comes up to the top of the buttes to sit watch with Furiosa and Max, hair black or sliver in the dark and the moonlight, a blanket drawn tight around her shoulders.

Polly slaps the table and points at Furiosa. “You’re taking the war rig.”

***

There was only one time that Nada came back to visit Amí’s tree, but when she did she brought the beaten and battered cab of the old war rig to trade from a crop of seeds. It wasn’t long after the war with the north – Sapling still remembered her then, and screamed and ran into her arms, then towed her up to the roof to see the tree growing strong, facing towards the mountains. Nada stayed up there for most of an afternoon, sitting next to the trunk and looking east.

“I think I remember her,” Sapling says idly, poking through the bags of seeds that Dag is sorting for Furiosa to take. “She had a beard, right? And only one eye?”

Max shakes his head. “Amí was missing the eye.” He barely blinked when Furiosa told him she wanted to go on a hunt across the desert for old bones because her dreams were being haunted; he has, she knows, done stranger things because of less.

It still amazed her, sometimes, that he stayed.

Sapling clearing her throat brings Furiosa back to the present. “I thought Amí was my imaginary friend, and that they lived in a cherry tree.”

“They fed that tree,” Dag says. She pauses her sorting. “Maybe you should go with them. Learn some history.”

Sapling stops circling the table. “Won’t it be dangerous?”

“Running from a slaver warlord who fancied himself a god was dangerous. You’re going to meet an old friend and pay your respects to the dead.”

Sapling glances between the Dag and Furiosa. “You said Polly wants you to take the war rig.”

“Good,” Vik pipes up from the end of the table. She’s sifting through a pile of corn seeds. “Buzzards change. New power. No trust.”

“They’ll leave us alone if they see the rig,” Furiosa says.

“What’s this about the war rig?” Cheedo emerges from the library carrying a book that’s as thick as her head. “What are you planning?”

They needed ambassadors to Gas Town and the Bullet Farm once their new political systems found steady footing. Cheedo now spends half her time in Gas Town; Yabby, Furiosa’s old lieutenant, goes to the Bullet Farm. All the ambassadors meet a few times a year to hash out the worst disagreements. The system hasn’t broken down yet.

“Furiosa had a dream while you were gone, love,” says the Dag. “She and the girls are going to find some friends’ bones. I thought Sapling should go along.”

Cheedo’s face clears. “Angharad.”

Dag nods, then flicks a finger at Furiosa. “If there’s anything left of the Keeper…”

“Too many dead from that crash; if there was something left of her, it would have been in the cab of the rig.” Furiosa stalls out at the look on Dag’s face. “If we find anything… we’ll bring it with us.”

“Thank you.”

Sapling shakes her head. “How many dead bodies are you going to be carting around?”

Cheedo blows a lungful of dust off the book’s cover. “You _should_ go with them. Learn the stories. I think it would be good for you.”

“I _know_ the stories,” Sapling complains. “Valkyrie: the bait in the tower. Run down by the People Eater. Angharad: pregnant, the ringleader of the escape, also run down. Miss Giddy: the storyteller. Killed because you left her behind. Nux: the War Boy. Crashed the rig so you lot could escape. The Keeper of the Seed and the rest of the Vuvalini: died trying to get you home.” Her gaze sweeps the room. “What’s the _point_ of constantly dredging up the past?”

Furiosa can hear Nada’s voice asking the question before it’s out of her mouth: “Do you know how we met the Rock Riders?”

“Should I? Should I care?”

Vik clears her throat. It’s loud, and it takes several seconds before the rasping and wheezing stops. “You ask, always, about my stories. You don’t want to see them?”

“I don’t want to _be in_ one of your stories. I don’t want to get kidnapped or raped or left out there to die in the desert.” Sapling wraps her arms around herself. “Doesn’t going out there scare you? Any of you?”

Furiosa shrugs. “Fear makes us cautious. Too much makes us weak.”

Cheedo steps up to the table to set down her book, then lays a hand on Sapling’s arm.  “When we were halfway to the Green Place, I turned around and ran back towards a pair of War Boys who were closing in on us. Because I thought I would be safer in a cage.” She glances at Furiosa through a memory of a gunshot. “You don’t have to go, but you’ll learn something, if you do.”

“About what?”

Dag shrugs. “You can’t hide inside the Citadel for your entire life.”

Cheedo sighs. “Being alive in this world is dangerous. Going with Furiosa, you’ll be as safe as anyone can be outside the Citadel.” She squeezes Sapling’s shoulder, then lets her hand fall. “It’s your choice.”

***

“Sorry to talk like you weren’t in the room,” Cheedo says once Sapling has gone to sleep. “The older she gets, the more afraid she is of going outside the walls.”

“It’s hardly a surprise,” Dag says. “All we have to tell her are war stories. She likes them for their endings, but she’s terrified of getting caught in one. You van’t blame her.”

“No good to drag her out by her hair, but if she wants to come, we’ll protect her.” Max scratches at his stubble and glances at Vik, snoring in her wheelchair at the end of the table. Furiosa leans against his shoulder.

“She’s afraid because we raised her to be,” Cheedo mutters, only halfway talking to them. “She could be me, cowering before we ran.” She rubs at her eyes. “It took Angharad to talk me into it.”

“She had to convince me, too,” Furiosa says. “She was good at that sort of thing.” She glances out the window at the low-hanging moon. “Let her sleep on it. This isn’t a war. She can make up her own mind.”

***

They get quiet days, sometimes, now. Days with less stress. Less arguing. Less thinking. They get days when the horizon is so fuzzy and thick, even Gas Town isn’t distinguishable as anything except another patch of wind-stirred sand in the distance. And they get nights when everything is so clear and cold that icicles grow in your hair if you stand outside for too long.

The cold makes the muscles in Furiosa’s thigh ache, and Max’s knee, and sometimes other spots, too. Her hand. Her left shoulder. Something down in her chest.

The last Northern woman – the one with the white skin and red hair and blue eyes – died the stubborn, sickening death of a lost cause: she refused food or water until her brain gave out and her heart juddered to a stop in her jagged-boned chest, and then they burned her corpse.

Max sliced off a thick tangle of her hair before they started the fire. After, he drove out alone with the ashes and hair and a head-tilt of farewell and didn’t come back for an entire cycle of the moon. A dozen people tried to be the first to tell Furiosa when he returned. She kept working on a new chair for Polly until he came to find her. He smelled like a pillar of salt. But his hands were warm.

For generations born after the end of the world, they don’t do so bad. They don’t do great. But they don’t do terribly.

The Bullet Farm had five coups in as many years. Gas Town barely survived a plot to blow up its refinery. The Citadel had to ration Guzzoline for a long, long time, through a winter that saw too many lost-hope deaths, everyone pulled back to sit behind its walls with hollow eyes staring down gun barrels, until one day the big gas tankers drove up the road again, and the choking chain loosened. A year later, there were buildings made of scavenged metal and slabs of rock being built around the base of the Citadel. They look like red and gray shoots of growth creeping out of the sand.

Sapling squints out the window as they roll out from the shadow of the towers. “Do you think we’ll ever make the whole world green again?”

“It was never _all_ green,” Toast says. She’s up front next to Furiosa, feet kicked up on the dashboard. Max is up top on the tanker to sit watch.

“Vik says it was,” Sapling insists. “Green everywhere, and water that didn’t have to be pumped out of the earth. She says there used to be so much water, you could stack ten Citadels on top of each other and still not reach the surface.”

“There must still be some of those places left.” Capable moves to lean her weight against the door, then shifts back, sinking further into her seat. “The world doesn’t end at the horizon.”

“The oceans had salt in the water,” Toast says. “Maybe the salt flats, beyond the mountains – maybe that’s where the ocean started, Before.”

Furiosa turns the wheel left; the front tires leave the road. They’re headed east.

Capable leans forward to peer out the windshield. “We had to imagine that whole first fight, hiding down in the hole.” She speaks without inflection. “We were trying to guess who was winning the entire time. Even after Angharad came back.”

Sapling perks up. “With the Buzzards?”

“The Buzzards, the War Boys, the sandstorm…” Toast glances up through the sunroof. “Max the bloodbag, strapped to the front of a car.”

“ _Bloodbag_ ,” Sapling repeats, and shudders.

Furiosa blinks. “I almost forgot that word,” she murmurs.

She doesn’t mean it to be audible, but Toast’s head turns, and Furiosa hears Capable mutter, “Me, too.”

***

Furiosa lets Max drive when they get within sight of the mountains; she sits up on top of the tanker with her rifle in her lap, sheltered from the wind by the shell of an ancient car. Sapling comes up with her.

“How _did_ you meet the Rock Riders?”

It takes Furiosa a moment, reaching back into a snarl of memories, to find the first thread of the answer. “I made a deal for safe passage through their pass when we were running from the Citadel. There was fighting anyway.” She pauses. “I broke the terms. I was supposed to be alone.”

Sapling says nothing.

“When we knew there was an army coming out of the north, we wanted every ally we could find. Nada was in power. Maybe because of what we did. She traded the safety of her people for the aid of her warriors. We had three hundred Rock Riders in the Citadel, waiting for that army to come. That’s when you met her. And Amí.”

“Amí,” Sapling sighs. “How did they die?”

Furiosa has to sit again, for a while. She doesn’t want to answer that one.

“It was in the battle, right?”

“They got shot through the liver,” Furiosa says. “So they took down a war rig alone.”

Sapling jerks a little, and goes quiet. They’re into the shadow of the mountains when she asks: “All alone?”

“I helped them get on the rig; they did the rest.”

“Okay.” Sapling looks up at the peaks. “I’m gonna go back down now.”

Furiosa nods.

Sapling slides off the front of the tanker then climbs onto the back of the cab to reach the sunroof and drop through it. Furiosa gazes at the walls rising around them, sees the curling horn of a Rock Rider’s helmet, and lifts her metal arm before it vanishes from sight. She heaves herself to her feet.

There’s green. High up, barely visible from the road, tucked against north-facing walls. She’s not sure if that’s new. She _is_ sure that she can hear a building rumble of engines coming to greet them.

Max takes his foot off the gas once they reach the widest point of the pass, letting the rig roll to a halt. He keeps the engine running.

Furiosa waits.

One bike buzzes up the pass towards them, stopping close enough to hurl a grenade but far enough that a pistol shot would probably miss. Their feet jingle when they plant them in the dirt; they’re wearing golden leather boots with large, spiky wheels attached to the heels.

“I know you,” Furiosa calls. “You fought the north with us.”

“Maybe,” the Rider calls back. “Maybe I killed someone you knew.”

There are now bikes lining the ridges above the pass. Furiosa lifts her chin, searching chests and hips until she finds another glint of gold, this one revolver-shaped, strapped across the ribs of a Rider sitting alone, on a lower crest of rock than the others. There’s a slice of black hair shot through with silver visible between the bottom of their scarf-wrapped face and the collar of their jacket.

Furiosa yells across the canyon: “You’ve gone gray?”

“You’re one to talk, Lady Fury.” Nada shakes her head, then swats a gloved hand at the rest of the Riders. “Get back to your lives; there’s nothing to fight here.” She revs her engine as Max kills the war rig’s. She’s leaning against the cab, helmet dangling from her belt, by the time Furiosa gets both feet on the ground. “What’s the occasion? Is the world ending for a second time?”

“No,” Furiosa says. “We’ve come to kill you.”

“Of course,” Nada says, and wraps her in a hug so tight Furiosa feels her ribs bend. She lets herself smile. Nada’s beard and hair still have more black than gray, but the ratio is shrinking. “How long has it been?” Nada asks. “Ten years? Twelve?”

Furiosa glances back over her shoulder at the small crowd standing next to the war rig. She nods at Sapling, half-hidden behind Toast. “You tell me.”

Nada looks, then squints, and then her expression clears into wide eyes and a half-open mouth. “Mother of the mountains,” she mumbles. Then, louder: “Do you remember me?”

Sapling goes red as she steps out from between her aunts. “A little.” She rubs at her nose. “I know you’re Nada. I remember the beard. And the bike.”

“I remember _you_.” The Rider with the boots has crept closer, even as the others have scattered into the wind. Their helmet comes off: sandstone-red skin, blue eyes, curly black hair cropped short. “I was your age during the war. You were knee-height, always attached to her – “ a nod at Nada “ – or Amí.”

Nada’s eyes drop shut. For one full breath, she is exhausted, and then her eyes open and she is brutally, fiercely present again.

“I remember Amí,” Sapling offers with both hands. “I spent a lot of time talking to that tree, even after I lost the meaning behind the name.” She pauses. “It’s still there, you know.”

“I keep meaning to go back,” Nada says. “At this rate, I’ll just have to ask you to bury me next to them and hope they forgive me for the wait.” She tilts her chin towards the sky. “It’s getting dark. Let us put some food in you, and tell us why you came.”

“Thank you,” Furiosa says.

Nada flaps a hand at her. “Just don’t bring us any more wars.”


End file.
